The idea for College Abacus, an online college cost-comparison website she launched with husband Whitney Haring-Smith in 2012, was actually inspired by complaints from her mother-in-law.

These were no ordinary dinner-table gripes, however: Tori Haring-Smith is the president of Washington & Jefferson College, a small liberal-arts school in the Pittsburgh area. She worried about the data labyrinth families would had to face when inputing their information into schools’ net price calculators.

The entrepreneurial couple, who met at Oxford, realized that was a problem they could tackle.

Thus College Abacus, a website hailed by the press as the “Kayak of college financial aid,” was born.

Seldin hoped that the buyout would help her website thrive and remain free of cost for users.

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“It’s a 6,500-person company now. Versus me and 10 contractors,” she said. She added that ECMC “not only embraced the technology but also the mission.”

The following month, Seldin became VP of innovation at ECMC, leading the group’s small “Innovation Lab” near Mount Vernon Square.

Inside the ECMC innovation lab. (Courtesy photo)

With the added responsibilities, of course, came new headaches. Seldin shrugged that in College Abacus’s startup phase, “I had less paperwork.” Now, she has processes to follow.

Seldin has many projects on her plate now, including the $2.5 million Campaign for Innovation at Zenith Education Group. Zenith is the ECMC arm that took over several campuses of Corinthian College, the infamous for-profit college network that went bankrupt after multiple fraud accusations.

But she still spends a quarter to half of her time on College Abacus, she said. Last month, the website released a new tool for low-income students that incorporates Pell Grant information.

Her new role has also allowed Seldin to become a talent curator of sorts.

She met one UX designer, Samantha Zucker,while “scoping talent” at a Consumer Finance Protection Bureau data jam. Seldin is partial to fostering female dev talent in her shop: out of ECMC Lab’s 10 full-time employees, seven are women, and the space hosts Women Who Code DChack nights twice a month.

“Usually when you sell your company, you kind of roll the dice,” said Seldin. But for her, she concluded, “It’s kind of a Cinderella story.”